Assaulting Planets
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For more Statistics see the Planet Database
You will need resources in the beginning, mostly metal. Well, you will need much, much metal all the time, thus also in the beginning. Your growing L is already a good step into the right direction, but it is recommended to take the K with your second colony ship as you will need some crystal sooner or later, and planets grow slowly. The colony ship will land on the K and transform into a basic settlement with 50,000 inhabitants. They will copulate from time to time and grow by 2% (or a bit faster if you're Bakani) every hour, so it will take about a week for the planet to grow from a border colony into a main world of your empire. Think ahead! After a week, you will be glad for the mined crystal. You could immediately build a mine on the planet.
However, you have another option: The Festival of Rebirth. You can activate it under "Management" and it will increase growth by 400% (i.e., it will multiply it by 4). However, this comes at a price of 2000 Voids per hour.
What's your Probe doing anyway? Found one of these huge brown balls already? These would be class D planets. Don't grow too fast, few resources, but you will like them later when they're full. Class J are better in the beginning as they fill up in no time, thus make good research planets early on. If you find them after some weeks of playing, however, they're nothing but small planets with no resources.
If you happen to find a second uninhabited K within colony ship range and are as daring, you could even divert your colony ship and take this other K instead. Why? It is a future fuel base for your colony ships in another system, which is good. And it is unlikely that the K in your system is within reach of another player - but not impossible, so beware! Use all your newly-built Probes to scout around and find out where the neighbours are situated. If they might colonize your own K, secure them early. Voilà , you have just met Mr. Early-Game Spirit. In the beginning, it's all about grabbing planets before others can take them. (Note: The initial need for certain resources may vary from round to round! While it was the best idea to colonize a K right away during Game 10, things could look different by the time you read this. For Game 11, searching for a second L class planet certainly was a better idea than taking a K.) If you actually colonize a planet in another system you should quickly build a shipyard on it to increase your fuel range well into this new system with its 2 other planets! Expand!
Class P Planets are, well, okay. They are fairly large, grow fairly fast and mining them will give you much of the rare Polomite. However, you won't need large amounts of Polomite for the time being. They make good research planets in the beginning.
Class X and class Y planets are a class of their own. Both grow incredibly slow, so slow that it is even more efficient to colonize them with multiple colony ships instead of trying to use a Festival of Rebirth on them! The first one is just huge, the latter gives you precious Calanium which you will need for the late-game, if you ever get that far. Probably you already see that both aren't any good in the early days! Additionally, it will be difficult to defend the small colonies in future wars.
Class R and especially class C make for good mining planets.
